How ‘In the Seashell Hum’ forces audiences to tackle mental health

The result was less a conventional theatre experience and more an act of collective witnessing than simply presenting mental health as a social issue.

The title itself becomes the play’s first metaphorical invitation. A seashell hums when pressed against the ear; the sound is not the ocean, but the body interpreting echoes trapped within it.

In Sidang’s play, that hum becomes the noise inside the mind of Baraka, a man wrestling with schizoaffective disorder while carrying the inherited ghosts of trauma around him.

At the centre of the story is Athman (played by actor Gitura Kamau), a soldier presumed by Baraka’s (played by actor Nick Ndeda) love interest to be real and living, yet who in truth died a decade earlier.

Athman, who was Baraka’s cousin, is now an apparition, reconstructed by Baraka’s mind from fragments of memory and longing. Through him, the play explores post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers returning from Somalia, even as it simultaneously interrogates depression, suicide, postpartum depression and the invisible labour of caregiving.

Baraka’s girlfriend, Salma (played by actress Foi Wambui), and his sister Kendi (played by actress Angela Mwandanda) show how caregivers usually suffer emotional exhaustion or shock, depending on how much information they have when dealing with those who suffer from mental health.

Some of it can be pinned to not having required knowledge on the disease their loved one suffers from or simply being blindsided by the loved ones hiding what it is they are experiencing.

Sidang’s most ambitious achievement is perhaps this refusal to simplify mental illness into a single diagnosis or narrative. Instead, the play layers conditions and experiences into one another, suggesting not only the interconnectedness of mental suffering, but also the impossibility of neatly categorising human pain.

The playwright’s research is evident in the texture of the script. Sidang’ spent years reading clinical material, academic research and testimonies from soldiers struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after deployment in Somalia.

Some of the stories came anonymously through published accounts and university theses. Others emerged through conversations with caregivers, therapists and people working within psychosocial support systems.

The production’s greatest strength is not technical accuracy, but emotional sensitivity. Sidang approaches mental illness not as spectacle, but as lived experience. The language of the play avoids caricature and easy labels. Characters are never reduced to conditions. Instead, the production insists on placing the person before the diagnosis.

That restraint becomes especially significant in a cultural landscape where mental illness is still routinely discussed through stigma, mockery or silence.

For Sidang, the silence surrounding men’s mental health formed one of the production’s emotional anchors. Kenyan masculinity, as the play repeatedly suggests, is built around performance: the performance of strength, provision and emotional invulnerability.

Men are raised to believe vulnerability diminishes masculinity. To admit fear, despair or emotional collapse is to risk being perceived as weak.

The play understands how dangerous that performance can become.

Baraka’s psychological disintegration is, therefore, not simply medical; it is social. He inhabits a society that gives men little language for emotional suffering until that suffering erupts into crisis. The production repeatedly returns to this contradiction: men are expected to carry impossible burdens silently, then are condemned when they collapse beneath them.

What makes In the Seashell Hum particularly affecting is that it never abandons tenderness while dealing with these heavy themes. There are moments of humour scattered throughout the production—brief, necessary breaths amid the suffocation. Audience laughter arrives not from forced comic relief, but from recognisable human interactions that ground the story in emotional realism.

That realism is heightened by a cast clearly chosen for emotional intelligence as much as technical ability. Sidang’ stated he deliberately avoided performers who would treat the play like melodrama. Instead, the actors, including Ben Teke who plays Baraka’s doctor, approach their roles with unsettling sincerity, creating relationships that feel lived-in rather than performed.

The chemistry among the ensemble becomes one of the production’s defining qualities. No character exists in isolation; each performance deepens another. One leaves remembering not individual scenes, but emotional exchanges: glances, pauses, interruptions, moments where care and exhaustion coexist uneasily.

The play’s emotional weight extended beyond the audience into the rehearsal room itself. Cast members reportedly found certain scenes deeply triggering, many drawing personal connections to experiences of suicide, depression or caregiving in their own lives.

In response, the production partnered with mental health organisations,including Basic Needs Basic Rights Kenya and Mental360 to provide psychosocial support during rehearsals and performances.

That decision transformed the production from theatre into something closer to public intervention.

Therapists were available at the venue for audience members who became overwhelmed during performances. Some reportedly sought support immediately after the show. Such measures are rare within Kenyan theatre, but perhaps necessary for work engaging trauma this directly.

The production also staged mental health activations ahead of the play in spaces such as Creatives Garage and Mageuzi Hub, hosting conversations around alcoholism, suicide, postpartum depression and stigma. In doing so, In the Seashell Hum expanded itself beyond the stage and into civic conversation.

The ambition behind the production becomes even more remarkable considering its largely self-funded nature. Sidang’ financed much of the project himself, bragging that “there’s no one who can say Adipo owes me a thing from that production”, while partners provided technical, logistical and therapeutic support rather than direct funding.

That investment reveals itself in the production’s technical polish, particularly in its sound design. Under the direction of Eric Musyoka of Decimal Media, the play achieves one of the most immersive soundscapes recently seen in Kenyan theatre.

The production leaves behind not catharsis, but resonance.

Like the echo inside a seashell, it lingers long after the theatre empties.

Musyoka approaches the stage almost cinematically. Street sounds drift through scenes with uncanny realism. Cars honk faintly in the distance. Ambient noise folds into memory and hallucination until the audience itself begins inhabiting Baraka’s unstable mental terrain. The sound does not accompany the play; it becomes part of its psychology.

This sonic architecture is crucial because In the Seashell Hum depends heavily on atmosphere. Much of the production’s power lies not in what is explicitly said, but in what lingers underneath conversations: grief, paranoia, loneliness and suppressed terror.

One of the play’s most affecting dimensions is its portrayal of caregivers. Characters such as Salma and Kendi carry emotional burdens often overlooked in discussions around mental illness. The play quietly honours the exhaustion of loving someone whose suffering you cannot fully reach.

In this way, the production broadens the conversation beyond individual pathology toward communal responsibility. Mental illness affects families, relationships and entire support systems. Caregivers themselves become vulnerable to emotional collapse, isolation and burnout.

Audience responses suggest the play succeeded precisely because it refused emotional distance. Older viewers reportedly interpreted it through the lens of parenting and familial fear, while younger audiences recognised contemporary anxieties around depression, suicide and emotional isolation among youth.

The production’s post-show atmosphere reportedly resembled group processing more than applause and departure.

And perhaps that is where the play’s true achievement lies: not in providing answers, but in making silence impossible.

Sidang repeatedly describes the production less as a finished theatrical product and more as the beginning of a movement. The language surrounding the play — “from awareness to action” — became central during post-performance discussions and audience engagement sessions.

Those discussions also exposed the structural limitations facing serious theatre in Kenya.

Despite ambitions to tour Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, Kampala and Dar es Salaam, the production faces a sobering reality: Kenya possesses remarkably little theatre infrastructure outside Nairobi.

The Kenya National Theatre remains virtually the only public venue capable of hosting a production of this scale. Cities such as Kisumu lack fully equipped theatre spaces altogether, while others offer only small stages with limited technical capability.

That infrastructural absence becomes symbolic in itself. Kenyan theatre artistes are expected to tell increasingly urgent stories while operating within systems that provide minimal institutional support.

Yet In the Seashell Hum persists despite those constraints.

Its aspirations already extend toward film adaptation, and one senses the material could transition powerfully onto screen, particularly given its cinematic sound design and psychological intimacy. Still, there is something uniquely unsettling about encountering this story live, seated among strangers equally suspended between discomfort and empathy.

The play’s closing moments reportedly involved audiences lighting phone torches while repeating the phrase “from awareness to action.” In lesser hands, such symbolism might have felt sentimental. Here, it appears to have landed differently — not as empty performance, but as collective acknowledgement.

Because In the Seashell Hum ultimately understands something many issue-based productions fail to grasp: awareness alone changes very little.

The play does not pretend theatre can solve mental health crises, dismantle stigma or repair broken systems. What it can do — and what Sidang’s production achieves with devastating clarity — is create temporary spaces where difficult truths become impossible to ignore.

It forces audiences to sit with psychological suffering without looking away. It asks men to reconsider the emotional prisons they inherit. It humanises people too often flattened into diagnosis or stereotype. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds caregivers that their exhaustion, too, deserves recognition.

For a first staging, In the Seashell Hum arrives remarkably assured in both artistic vision and emotional purpose. It is imperfect in the way ambitious theatre often is — occasionally overloaded by the sheer number of themes it attempts to hold — yet even that excess feels strangely appropriate for a story about minds overwhelmed by noise.

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